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He stopped and for a second or two we stood very still, locked together, our breathing coming in heavy bursts.

‘We shouldn’t be doing this, should we?’ he whispered into my ear.

I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak.

‘Shall we stop?’ he asked, resting his forehead against mine so that I couldn’t look at him properly with perspective any more, it was like we were one person. I wanted to taste him on my tongue, like I had a second ago, and almost grabbed the back of his head and made him kiss me again.

‘Absolutely,’ I said, sounding more certain than I felt.

He took his time releasing me from his grasp, running his hands down the sides of my body and then taking a step back. I felt instantly cold and alone again and wanted to say forget it, let’s go for it and drag him into the bedroom and have the night of our lives. Because it would be, I knew it, and it wasn’t my imagination playing tricks on me. But I’d felt similarly last time – less guarded, perhaps, but with the same desire and recognition that I was happier when I was with him than I was when I was with anybody else. And then it had fallen apart and I didn’t want that to happen again, not when we were in such a good place, and Carla was relying on us, and my whole family were relying on me.

‘I should get some sleep,’ I said, fumbling to find my shoes, my heart still pumping blood around my body at a rate of knots, wondering how we’d got here when this time last week we hated each other.

‘Do you have to go?’ he asked, reaching out to take my hand, tugging me gently towards him again. I made myself pull in the opposite direction, my hand slipping out of his.

‘See you in the morning, OK? We’ll email Carla then.’

He nodded. ‘OK.’

I looked over my shoulder at him as I left his room. Hewas still on the balcony, facing me and I almost ran straight back into his arms. Of course it would be amazing to stay with him all night long, to throw caution to the wind, to do something just because I wanted to and to hell with what happened after that. To be with someone who didn’t need anything from me, except perhaps for me to write half a book. But it was too much of a risk and there was too much at stake and when I was back in the safety of my room, I knew I’d made the right decision.

Except that that night I had the worst sleep of my life. I kept thinking about how there was just a door between us, aware of how my body ached for him, tossing and turning, tossing and turning, imagining him naked under his covers until I almost gave in and got up and knocked on his door. It would be so easy, a few steps, the turn of a handle. I thought about that for what felt like hours until eventually, exhausted, I fell asleep.

Chapter Twenty-One

I was pacing around my room wondering whether I dared go down for breakfast and what the hell I was going to do about my (frankly phenomenal) kiss with Theo when a white piece of paper slid under my door. I looked at it for a beat or two, my heart in my throat. For all the listening at our interconnecting door I’d done, all the pressing my ear up against it and trying to work out what he was doing, what he was watching on TV, whether or not he was writing, I’d never considered slipping him a note. Perhaps it was something bad and he thought it best to do it in writing. Maybe yesterday had finished him off and he’d booked himself an early flight home. I approached it tentatively, bending to pick it up. On the hotel’s headed notepaper he’d simply written:

Breakfast? Fifteen minutes?

I smiled to myself. He wasn’t blanking me, that was something. We weren’t going to have another six years of silence, we were going to face this like the mature, emotionally intelligent adults I assumed we were. So what if we’d kissed? We’d stopped before we’d gone too far. It had been nice (an understatement) and really, no harm had been done. I didn’t feel any differently about him today than I had yesterday. Or if I did, I wasn’t going to let myself go there.

I went over to my desk, grabbed a pen and scribbled a reply.

See you down there.

Just as I sat down to tuck into what had become my usual breakfast – scrambled eggs, crusty French bread and a slice of Comté cheese followed by yoghurt with berries – Theo joined me at my table, his hair still wet from the shower. I tried not to think about how, if I’d made a different decision, I could have been showering with him this morning. How that would have felt. Great, probably. I pulled myself back to the present. For now, my plan of action was to act like nothing had changed, even though I could hear Melissa’s voice in my head telling me to communicate, to stop being afraid of telling people how I felt.

‘Been for a run?’ I asked.

‘Gym,’ he said, scraping his chair back, throwing himself into it. ‘Rowing machine.’

‘Very impressive,’ I said. As was everything about him.

I envied the fact that Theo seemed to be able to focus on anything he set his mind to, whereas for me that level of focus and ambition seemed only to apply to writing books. Which I supposed was something. Lots of people said they wanted to write a book but never did. I regularly reminded myself that the success ofLittle Boy Losthad been an experience most authors could only dream of, especially when my bi-annual royalty statement had revealed distinctly mediocre sales of late. I desperately wanted to achieve everything we achieved back then all over again. I considered what it would mean to get anotherNew York Timesbestseller. Money, for sure, but also recognition, prestige, reassurance. Security. And if we could experience the highs of it together rather than being in a state of pretending the other didn’t exist, that would make it even more special than the first time around.

‘I got your chapters,’ I told Theo. ‘I’ve combined themwith mine and I’ve tidied the manuscript up, added page numbers and so on. Are you happy for me to send them over to Carla?’

‘Hmmmn,’ he said, keeping his mouth firmly closed over a mouthful of black coffee. He swallowed. ‘Let’s do it.’

I got my phone out, opened the document I’d emailed to myself, looked at it as though it held the key to my future, good or bad, and then forwarded it to Carla with a short note. When I’d laid in bed this morning reading through all eight of our chapters, I’d thought it might have been the best work we’d ever done together, and it was certainly tighter and pacier than anything I’d managed on my own.

‘Sent,’ I said.

Theo held two fingers out, crossing them in front of me.

I crossed my fingers back.

‘I have to say, this whole experience has been far less painful than I thought it was going to be,’ he said with a teasing smile.